BuzzerBeater Forums

I would appreciate if you could post skill sets for the following players:
Motion SG
Motion C
Push the ball SG
Run and Gun SG

No blabla, just the skills and why you think it has to be this way. We can talk a lot without saying anything, so I want numbers.

I would/will post in your inbox just pm. because a lot see what I say as mis-information when it is not.

I can explain why it has to be this way, because every tactic need certain amount of skill to make it work. This is fact which non can deny.

Swoosh in Japan advocated to remove LI for many seasons before quitting. Many people have come up with this idea before. I'm not necessary a proponent of it, but removing LI is also another quick easy fix I guess. The reason I am not for it is its the same kind of thinking that got us into the LI situation back when everyone was training JS like crazy and R&G ruled the day, they just gimped outside shooting to fix it...and that landed us where we are now.

I've said this before and I will repeat it now. All skills should be included in the salary formula for each position, even if their impact is negligible. The proper way to set things up would be that after the initial settings decided by the devs, the salary automatically changes a little towards an equilibrium level. The equilibrium level is determined by how much of each skill (say, beyond respectable) can be found on players playing in a specific role. It needs to be gradual, but if everyone plays players with very high IS at PG then you either change the Game Engine or you make IS cost more for the position. In the R&G days, JS would have become increasingly more expensive too.

There is a lot of ways you can balance things over time, this seemed the easiest and most logical to implement. In fact it only takes some basic statistical analysis and changing parameters in the salary formulas. They could have also been very transparent about it indicating which skills were going to cost more and which were becoming cheaper, so that people would know how they were going to be affected salary-wise in a span of 10-12 seasons if everyone continued to train and boost the same skills.

A small reduction in efficiency of OD, and I stress small (so that it would still be the better guard skill but not by so much as it is now), would probably be still a good idea. After that, the salary formulas need to reflect the reality of the game. Players with exceptional post skills and elite perimeter defense are almost nonexistant in reality. 3&D guys are very common in reality and they are nonexistant in the game (because 3 point shooting is rendered useless by overpowered OD and expensive/not effective enough JR in comparison). A simulation where a team fields 5 post players and is very efficient on the court does not simulate the game of basketball very accurately, but the reality of BB is that teams constructed in this way have been very successful in the last 15 seasons.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 12/2/2014 7:37:38 PM

OK so what happens if they overdid it and in 8 seasons we realise that having 20 SB and low OD will be fine because that will stop anything? What happens if it turns out that the benefits of JR and SB are not enough or cost too much for the levels you need to get to? We won't know for sure for many seasons, nobody knows.

So asking for more changes in those areas I think must be put off until we see a large number of people first taking advantage of changes already made

They are trying to address the problem by changing the cost of 2 skills and maybe more radically than they should have. They are effectively shooting blindly at a target hoping that it works for a period (I hope so too). It is more efficient to take a look at what people do and balance all the skills based on such analysis over time. A one-off reduction of the cost of 2 skills might a) be too effective or b) not enough effective. Without waiting many seasons we won't know for sure. This is exactly what happened with OD in the past (which we now agree to be greatly overpowered).

However, if you make the more common skills more expensive, you will reduce the number of teams who play and create cookie cutter builds, as such builds will gradually cost more and naturally become less salary efficient. LI being the cookie cutter at the moment would be hit the most in terms of salary increase. At some point you will reach a situation where the benefit/cost of training any skill is similar because you priced the skills the way the users implicitly believe they are worth. The more effective in the GE a skill is, the more you want it. The more you want that skill, the more you pay for it in salary. At that point I don't train OD anymore because it costs so much that in terms of salary you'd benefit more from adding other skills.

All that remains is free vs. cheap. Free still wins. Easier said than done though because of the way they scale the positions and how RB/JS work as sliders to determine which salary formula a player falls under and to make sure that players salaries don't go down with a skill increase.

This is why you need a basic statistical analysis to check what skills are used the most at which position. Instead of setting the skills and let users exploit that setting, you need to take what users use at each position on average and make that the basic skill configuration. Currently the formula just picks the highest possible salary, nothing would change in that respect.

Clearly you'd need do some overall rebalancing by position to keep the relative cost similar to what it is now, but it's a fact that by design this has already been done. The developers decided that big men must have higher salary than guards, so the concept is already there and it was used for a deliberate and arbitrary choice when the parameters were set originally (and then modified based on subsequent decisions).

Asking for a complete formula redesign is probably too much, so if possible, I hope they find a way to up that IS cost somehow.

What's the difference between adding IS to the guards salary formula and adding all other (currently missing) skills too and setting them at very low levels? I think SB should be added too, just in case it becomes the next great skill to have and we realise we can't make it cost anything because it's not in the formula.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 12/2/2014 8:40:07 PM

The response I get from many other users is that if people train more PA/flow shooting %s will get better. And well more JR obviously will help too....but still lots of players built with JS and or IS (lots of bigs with IS without DR to help even at lower levels) and so its players being built to jack shots, to be jump shooters...and jumpshooters naturally shoot lower %s and jumpshooting teams shoot lower %s than teams that move the ball, get open, attack the basket etc.

Well, I agree. That's why incentivising one behaviour (hey guys, train JR and SB, they're cheaper and SB's impact also got boosted) does not equal penalising another (you know what? I will make IS cost on guards and OD cost even more than today). You need both to change things. Or we can wait until some brave soul like Nachtmahr has OD and SB at any position and can confirm how he does. Most people won't even try this unless they have some reasonable assurance that it will be effective at any level (like a post by Marin saying: if it turns out we boosted SB too little we will boost it again in the future, but we want it to have this specific effect irrespective if you play in DV or in the B3).

Last edited by Lemonshine at 12/2/2014 9:07:20 PM

My concern is that currently, especially at elite levels, shooting %s globally are unrealistically low. The game may be balanced/fair but, its not simulating a realistic basketball game anymore.

And yet the range of final scores seems to be on the mark, players' statistics globally seem to be in the right range ... bottom line, the games go 48 simulated minutes to a reasonable result. If you jack shooting percentages won't you disrupt an equilibrium more than you improve it?